Longest-serving senator, 92, dies

Robert C. Byrd served 51 years in the U.S. Senate, longer than anyone else in U.S. history, and with his six years in the House of Representatives, he was the longest-serving member of Congress.

He used that tenure to fight, often with florid words, for the primacy of the legislative branch of government and to help build, always with canny political skills, a modern West Virginia with vast amounts of federal money.

He became an institution within an institution, as President Barack Obama suggested in a statement of tribute Monday, hours after Byrd died at the age of 92 in a hospital in Fairfax, Va. Byrd, his health failing in recent years, had been admitted there late last week, experiencing heat exhaustion and severe dehydration. "America has lost a voice of principle and reason," the president said.

Byrd had held a number of Senate offices, including majority and minority leader and president pro tem. But the post that gave him the most satisfaction was chairman of the Appropriations Committee, with its power of the purse, a post he gave up last year as his health declined. A New Deal Democrat, Byrd used the position in large part to battle poverty in West Virginia, which he called "one of the rock-bottomest of states." He lived that poverty growing up in mining towns.

His attention brought the state billions of dollars for highways, federal offices, research institutes and dams. It also attracted criticism. Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan watchdog group, regularly crowned him the "king of pork," citing projects like the Robert C. Byrd Highway, two Robert C. Byrd federal buildings, the Robert C. Byrd Freeway, the Robert C. Byrd Center for Hospitality and Tourism, the Robert C. Byrd Drive and the Robert C. Byrd Hardwood Technologies Center.

As a champion of the legislative branch, he found cautionary tales in history. In 1993, as Congress weighed a line-item veto, which would have given President Bill Clinton the power to strike individual spending measures from bills, Byrd delivered 14 speeches on the history of Rome and the role of its Senate.

"Gaius Julius Caesar did not seize power in Rome," he said. Rather, he said, "the Roman Senate thrust power on Caesar deliberately, with forethought, with surrender, with intent to escape from responsibility."

A decade later, Byrd complained again. In deferring to President George W. Bush on the Iraq war, Congress had shown a willingness to "hand over, for the foreseeable future, its constitutional power to declare war," he wrote in "Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency" (Norton, 2004).

Byrd died around 3 a.m. Monday at the Inova Hospital in Fairfax, his office said. Gov. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat, will appoint an interim successor.

Byrd's perspective on the world changed over the years. He filibustered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and supported the Vietnam War only to come to back civil rights measures and criticize the Iraq war. Rating his voting record in 1964, Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal lobbying group, found that his views and the group's aligned only 16 percent of the time. In 2005, he got an ADA rating of 95.

Byrd's political life could be traced to his early involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, an association that almost thwarted his career and clouded it intermittently for years afterward.

In the early 1940s, he organized a 150-member klavern, or chapter, of the Klan in Sophia, W.Va., and was chosen its leader. Afterward, Joel L. Baskin, the Klan's grand dragon for the region, suggested that Byrd use his "talents for leadership" by going into politics.

Byrd insisted his klavern had never conducted white-supremacist marches or engaged in racial violence. He said in his autobiography that he had joined the Klan because he shared its anti-communist creed and wanted to be associated with the leading people in his part of West Virginia. He conceded, however, that he also "reflected the fears and prejudices" of the time.

He spent decades apologizing for what he called a "sad mistake."

He went on to vote for civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960, but when the more sweeping Civil Rights Act was before Congress in 1964, he filibustered for an entire night against it, saying the measure was an infringement on states' rights. He backed civil rights legislation consistently only after becoming a party leader in the Senate.